Meeting Notes from 9/27/07

Genealogy Focus Group Sep 27, 2007


Jim Julain
Roena Bayes
Caroline Drechsler
Cecelia
Curt Wright

MaryEllen memichael@fredco-md.net

We discussed an article from Smithsonian from a nay-sayer who calls genealogy bunk. The article was not totally negative and did have some interesting information to offer. There were a couple of interesting websites in the article. One was www.royalbastards.com where you must be a descendant of an illegitimate member of the British Royal Family to join. According to the author, almost any WASP American could qualify.
The other site is www.geni.com. I added this one to our favorites as it is a very basic family tree builder that might prove useful if you are just looking for an easy way to enter your family tree into a graphical format. Once the tree is built, you have several options for viewing and navigating the data.
Curt brought a large pension file he purchased from the National Archives site for one of his Urwilers. This file was especially useful in researching the descendents since the various pension applications listed all the children at the time.
Roena is looking for more information on one of her ancestors, Enoch Williams, who she knows fought in the War of 1812 and had a sister, Nancy who died in 1844 in Defiance County, OH. We tried the LDS site, www.familysearch.com with no luck. We tried www.ancestry.com and did find one candidate, a volunteer from PA, in the 1850 census.
Caroline is looking for a John Kirkpatrick who she thinks was a crew member on an immigrant ship and he was born in Ireland or Scotland. For this one, we searched the ISTG site, www.imigrantships.net. We found some interesting possibilities but this one will also require more research and more time searching this site.
Back to the Ancestry.com site, Curt pointed out you can look at the blank census forms to see what information was collected in the various census years. The 1900 census form, for example, asks for year of immigration, how long in the country and naturalization status.
Curt also mentioned that probate deeds also provide an excellent source for family members because the deed will list all the heirs of the deceased.
We looked at the LDS site www.familysearch.com à Library tab à Family History Library Catalog tab à Place Search à Topics à Vital Records. This will drill down to one or more records where, in the film notes, you can obtain the film number to order from the Family History Center. You can get to the land records and deeds this way. The Grantor indexes (sellers) and Grantee indexes (buyers) should be viewed first and this will point you directly to the film number and page where the transaction is recorded for the individuals you are researching.